Camila Chebez
Keywords: Rock, Ecology, Extractivism
Internship: Jennifer Tee, Giuseppe Licari
Read Thesis
linktr, camilachebez@gmail.com, Instagram
Do you trust the technology of your senses and the magnetism of the rock to take you through a process of oscillation, between pulling away and coming closer again? Encompassed by its porous body, Avalonia’s spirit permeates.
To lay your hands on its skin is to tap into its many voices,
to drag your fingers is to stir its textures.
So approach and listen to its tectonic like rhythms,
that challenges our very feet into a different dance with the cosmos.
Along the mining region of the Ruhr in Germany, Camila Chebez encounters Avalonia: an abandoned sandstone quarry that has turned into a popular climbing crag. Sharing its name with a micro-drifting continent from the Palaeozoic era, this site beckons for a closer look at its porous textures, which archive a deep history of impacting surfaces:
continents clashing continents,
machines extracting stones,
bodies climbing rocks,
rocks guiding movements.
Building upon the haptic qualities of the embodied practice of rock climbing, this work is an invitation to (re)explore an Earth too often figured as mute and inert, a wasteland in waiting. By playing with surfaces as a point of contact and projections as a collective memory, "Avalonia Topographies of Impact" puzzles together a narrative where ruins can become playgrounds for more-than-human encounters.
